Mystical places in Germany
6 legends · 5 cities
Regions and cities
Brandenburg1
Mecklenburg-Vorpommern1
North Rhine-Westphalia1
Saxony-Anhalt1
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Clever Hans
The residential inner courtyard at 10 Griebenowstraße in the Mitte district of Berlin, Germany. At the turn of the 20th century, this urban setting hosted public demonstrations of the Orlov Trotter stallion known as Clever Hans (Der Kluge Hans). The horse's apparent mastery of arithmetic and human language captivated international audiences, revolutionized animal cognition research, and led to the discovery of the observer-expectancy effect ("Clever Hans effect").
Greifswald and the Lights over the Bay
On the evening of 24 August 1990 a group of bright lights arranged in an arc hung over the Bay of Greifswald on the Baltic coast for several hours. Hundreds of people saw them from both sides of the water, and at least five filmed them — remarkable for the time and the place: East Germany had weeks left to exist. The recordings were examined by investigators and by the military. The likeliest explanation is a Soviet army exercise with parachute flares over the Peenemünde range; some of the footage fits it, and some — by timing and altitude — does not. The footage remains one of the longest amateur video records of the phenomenon in Europe.
Teufelsberg
Teufelsberg ("Devil's Mountain") is an artificial hill rising 120.1 meters above sea level within the Grunewald forest in the Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf borough of western Berlin, Germany. Engineered after World War II from roughly 26 million cubic meters of urban rubble piled directly atop the shell of an unfinished Nazi military-technical faculty, the summit became the location of "Field Station Berlin"—a classified Cold War signals intelligence (SIGINT) listening outpost operated by the US National Security Agency (NSA) and British intelligence. Crowned by weathered white geodesic radomes, the site stands as an iconic architectural monument to Cold War espionage and one of Europe’s premier open-air street art galleries.
The Brocken
The highest point of the Harz, where German tradition has witches gathering on Walpurgis Night — Goethe sent Faust there. The mountain gave its name to an optical effect: the Brocken spectre, the observer's own vast shadow cast on cloud below with a rainbow halo round the head. The effect is real and explicable, and probably lies behind a share of the stories of encounters at the summit.
Externsteine
A ridge of sandstone pillars in the Teutoburg Forest with a chapel and a 12th-century relief carved into the rock. It has attracted theories of an ancient sanctuary for centuries — from 19th-century romantics to Third Reich ideologues.
Beelitz-Heilstätten
A vast hospital complex outside Berlin, built around 1900 for tuberculosis patients. A wounded Hitler was treated here in 1916; parts of the site have stood empty since the 1990s and are green inside.